Habitot -- It's Hot / New kids museum opens tomorrow in Berkeley

Gina Moreland, founder of a children's museum in Berkeley called "Habitot", in the wind tunnel gallery of Habitot, the East Bay's first "discovery museum". Photo By Lea Suzuki

Gina Moreland, founder of a children's museum in Berkeley called "Habitot", in the wind tunnel gallery of Habitot, the East Bay's first "discovery museum". Photo By Lea Suzuki

Photo: LEA SUZUKI

Photo: LEA SUZUKI

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Gina Moreland, founder of a children's museum in Berkeley called "Habitot", in the wind tunnel gallery of Habitot, the East Bay's first "discovery museum". Photo By Lea Suzuki

Gina Moreland, founder of a children's museum in Berkeley called "Habitot", in the wind tunnel gallery of Habitot, the East Bay's first "discovery museum". Photo By Lea Suzuki

Photo: LEA SUZUKI

Habitot -- It's Hot / New kids museum opens tomorrow in Berkeley

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Five years spent cultivating the kindness of strangers will bear fruit this weekend when the East Bay's first "discovery museum" for young children opens in Berkeley.

The idea for the museum, Habitot, has long been known among parents and civic groups as one of those dreams harbored by a few dedicated parents with noble aspirations, no money and dubious prospects of success.

But the parents' persistent appeals, coupled with Habitot's traveling "Waterworks" hands-on exhibit, finally secured $200,000 in contributions -- enough to give the museum a home in the old Hink's department store building in downtown Berkeley.

"It's been a labor of love," said Gina Moreland, one of three founding parents, chairwoman of the board and all-purpose ringmaster overseeing everything from the placement of lighting fixtures to the donation of squirting toy turtles.

Kids can play in a pint-sized grocery store and cafe at Habitot, do experiments in a wind tunnel, and put on makeup, costumes and plays in a performance space. Like thousands of youngsters before them, they can also become absorbed in Waterworks, the water-play exhibit designed for 3- to 5-year-olds; when that's on tour, they can try their skills at a miniature golf course.

A carpeted room with simple interactive objects will be devoted to prewalkers, and toddlers will have their own "garden" of devices as well.

"It's a hands-on discovery museum," said Moreland, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of electric saws and drills during Habitot's busy prenatal period earlier this month. "I wanted to bypass the video-arcade options."

And unlike most of the interactive youth museums that have sprung up across the country, it's "geared for younger kids" up to age 7, she said.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

Museum planners say they designed its exhibits with recent research on child development in mind. For many child-rearing experts, the emphasis on early childhood as a critical learning time is even more important now because of an increase in children suffering from neglect caused by family breakdowns, crime, parental drug use and other problems.

"The end result is a lot of kids arriving in school who are really unprepared to learn," said Moreland, who taught science in Berkeley public schools for several years.

"Our sub-rosa mission is to involve parents and other care givers and help them understand more about early childhood development to try and help them support their kids in reaching their full potential," she said.

Habitot also will feature a family resource center with a library, drop-in advice from parenting professionals and parenting classes. Rounding out the museum's offerings will be a gift shop, a birthday- party room, a toy-lending library and classes for kids.

Moreland said the museum will help remedy a shortage of hands- on opportunities for the 280,000 preschool-age children in Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

HUGE DEMAND

One sign of the demand is the roster of more than 450 families from all across the East Bay who signed up for annual memberships before the museum opened, Moreland said. More than 50 preschools also signed up early for institutional memberships.

At 4,000 square feet, Habitot is starting out modestly, with the aim of moving to larger quarters when finances and resources permit -- a common story among such museums.

"Many started off small in an office or an old fire station and then grew," Moreland said.

One of those is the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito, aimed at ages 1 to 10, which began in a small storefront in the Corte Madera Town Center in 1987 before moving to its 29,000-square- foot home in renovated buildings at Fort Baker in 1991.

But not all such endeavors start tiny: The Bay Area's other major youth museum, Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose, which is geared for ages 1 to 13, started out in a new, spacious, 52,000-square- foot building. This was partly because of a $1.8 million donation from Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak and partly because the two local women behind it spent almost 10 years gathering enough capital, said museum spokeswoman Karen McBride.

Habitot's opening comes one month after the death of America's most celebrated expert on child care, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose son, Michael, is credited with pioneering interactive children's museums 30 years ago when he was director of the Children's Museum in Boston.

Museums for kids started long before Spock's efforts. The Brooklyn Children's Museum, which claims to be the world's first museum for young people, will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year. But it is only in the last generation that children's museums have made a dramatic departure from collections of viewable objects to hands-on, interactive environments.

The boom comes as many parents are increasingly worried about the nation's public education system and fearful of letting children run out and play unsupervised.

Virtually all the children's museums today are hands-on and interactive, an approach that extends to other child-friendly institutions that do not call themselves museums. Locally, Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science and the Exploratorium in San Francisco -- which Michael Spock has cited as one of his inspirations -- are leaders in hands-on science for kids.

PLEDGE TO DIVERSITY

One problem for Habitot and similar museums is that they can be expensive for poorer families. They have a reputation for catering to largely white middle-class and upper middle-class families, Moreland acknowledged.

"The East Bay is far too diverse for that to happen," she said. Consequently, one of Habitot's main goals is to make the museum accessible to low-income families, Moreland said.

The museum is applying for funding for a project that would pay for discount passes, subsidized memberships, scholarships and field trips for agencies and preschools serving low-income families.

Habitot will open to the general public from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow. It is located at 2065 Kittredge St., across from the main Berkeley Public Library. Admission is $6 for the first child age 7 and under, and $3 for each additional child. Adults are $4, and an adult with an infant (under 1) is $8 for the pair.

For more information call (510) 647-1111 or (510) 528-6319, or go to Habitot's Internet Web page at www.habitot.org.